Tales of the Knights Templar by Katherine Kurtz Read Free Book Online Page B

being opened and read.
    In the predawn hours of Friday, October 13, 1307, the king’s officers made simultaneous raids on nearly every Templar house in France, arresting every member of the Order to be found. Including knights, sergeants, serving brothers, and priests, they numbered several thousand. Strangely enough, there was almost no resistance—which perhaps reflects de Molay’s confidence that the pope would protect the Order and that it would be found innocent of any charges. Nogaret himself led the raid on the Paris Temple, and personally saw to the arrest and incarceration of the Grand Master and many of his principal officers.
    Though the pope had not authorized the arrests and argued with the king for some time over whether the king had the right to do so, he seems to have decided that Philip was not acting out of greed, since Philip proposed that the riches of the Temple would be placed at the disposal of the church, to finance the next Crusade. (This never happened. Instead, Philip secured a pledge of 200,000 livres from the Hospitallers, for which he was to ensure that the Hospital got the Temple’s lands.) Still, the charges were serious and had to be investigated—though only individual Templars might be examined; the pontiff reserved for himself the right to deal with the Order as a whole.
    In the months that followed, the Order came under the less than tender attentions of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, established in 1229 to inquire into cases of heresy and prevent its spread by whatever means, including the use of torture to extract confessions. St. Dominic and his followers, the Order of the Friars Preachers or “Black Friars” (so named for the black cowl and cloak worn over their white robes), had been particularly single-minded in attacking heresy, with the result that the Dominican Order—the Domini Canes, the “Hounds of the Lord”—became the principal agents of the Inquisition. More than a hundred Templars died under torture during the first few months of questioning, and many more came to confess nearly anything in the several years that followed, just to stop the pain. A few even took their own lives rather than endure it.
    The inquisitors themselves were divided on the question of the Templars. On May 30,1311, the Master of the Order of Friars Preachers, Aymeric of Piacenza, resigned his office rather than be compelled to attend a church council being convened at Vienne for the purpose of suppressing the Knights Templar. (As a secondary function, Vienne was also expected to deal with the mystical sectarians called Beghards and Beguines, who figure in our next story. One of the latter had been executed the previous year: a woman called Margaret Porete, whose mystical writings had aroused the ire of conventional theologians.) Appalled at the treatment of the Templars, and especially opposed to the use of torture to extract confessions, Aymeric had for several years evaded even direct efforts of King Philip IV and the pope to coerce the Dominicans into harrying the hapless Templars “more efficiently.” His dramatic resignation deprived the Templars’ enemies of a distinguished presence badly needed to bolster the illusion of legality vital for the success of the king’s plan.
    The same Chapter that saw Aymeric’s resignation also assigned Meister Eckhart, the great German preacher, scholar, and mystic, to return to Saint-Jacques in Paris, the foremost theological school of the Dominican Order, for an almost unprecedented second regency. It is unknown exactly why Eckhart was sent, but on several occasions he had represented Aymeric on missions of supervision and reform.
    Resident at that time at Saint-Jacques was Guillaume Imbert, the former Grand Inquisitor of France and Confessor of King Philip, who had been instrumental in drawing up the formal charges against the Knights Templar in 1307. Imbert had personally interrogated more than 140 knights and serving brothers, often